


anacrusis, the main event

by YouTheWrite



Category: Professional Wrestling, Professional Wrestling RPF, World Wrestling Entertainment
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, POV Second Person, Parkour is a religion, RPF, Real Names, everyone is in love with JoMo, no Kayfabe, the Past is another Dimension, where is the Palace Of Wisdom?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-06
Updated: 2020-02-06
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:08:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22551508
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouTheWrite/pseuds/YouTheWrite
Summary: John does make it back to WWE, though it takes him years. He just can’t remember why.
Relationships: John Morrison | Johnny Nitro/Melina Perez, John Morrison | Johnny Nitro/Taya Valkyrie, Johnny Nitro/Joey Mercury, The Miz/John Morrison | Johnny Nitro, The Miz/Maryse Ouellet, past - Relationship
Comments: 3
Kudos: 8





	anacrusis, the main event

This is the second beginning.

You are a forty-four year-old success story. You have international fame, and a physique others would do a lot to possess. You still have a full head of thick soft hair. You draw applause and chants no matter the matches you’re given on the card. 

You have a couple million in the bank, the best insurance to which your money can stretch, and desirable properties in the belly of Los Angeles - Manhattan Beach & Sherman Oaks. Given how long his hugs last you decide, tickled and gratified, that your realtor is in love with you. He is not the first or the only guy.

On a steaming California evening in August Vincent K. McMahon pocket-dials you, you call him back, and he tells you to fly out to Connecticut so you can sell his son the other half of your soul. He hangs up on you in less than a minute so you can’t let him be the one to convince you why you should.

You have a perfect wife at home, a chick who can make you tap out of a rear-naked choke and at the same time still favors quaint traditions like fixing dinner for you without a hint and never going to bed mad at each other. Indeed you never have a cross word with her until the WWE contract lands in your inbox. 

She scan-reads it once and calls you a company whore and forever Bruce Prichard’s bitch, and you snap back at her that you don’t want another TNA championship - because honestly, that’s all it is in reality even with a different name - and maybe you’re going back not for money or clout but to finish what you started, to fuck your favourite tag-team partner like you should have in the first place. It’s not true, just dumb wrestler-talk. She knows that. It’s why you married her. She waits a beat then laughs in your face. You end up cooking then you make it up to her later with hours of cowgirling, and sucking on a stomach more ripped than yours you forgo an apology in words.

There’s an ending before this, though; a spiral of twenty slow sleepless months, pulping memories through your mental filter despite not understanding what your instinct wants with the information.

That ending begins after you disentangle from a table and a ladder to retain your belts at Triplemania XXV, and make it backstage in time to beat the post-match adrenaline crash there. You draw your cellphone out of your bag, where it is shaking more than your hands. It’s Adam on the line. You haven’t thought about calling him in eight or nine years, and haven't spoken to him in several. His voice is nasal and somehow higher than it was in the old days. He says he’s proud of you. Under pressure to perform you stammer through a thanks and a greeting, and you agree to his proposal for a one-night only reunion in APW when the fed rolls through San Mateo at the end of the next month. You’re flattered, but on hanging up you wish you’d declined. You cool down by lunging in place, not stopping until the bemused custodian asks you to leave.

You don’t know how to break it to the teething disappointment in your guts that your specific locus is not Adam Birch or Melina Perez or the old warehouse in Stamford where you’re sure ‘The Biggest Show on Earth’ now only store dead-stock merchandise. Mel stays away from the event without a warning, doesn’t respond when you message to give her the news. You were with her for sixteen years and yet without social media you wouldn't know her current address, or whether she's trying for a kid again with that overgrown ape Knox, or what she does with her ample time in retirement.

So you show up alone to the barn in Daly City, all smiles. Adam has two pairs of the same pants for the ring, one for you. The announcer bills you as ‘Morrison & Mercury’, but you don’t dispute it or pass comment as you’re too busy eyeballing David Luster. 

It’s on. Following a vicious move-string while you’re tagged out Thornestowe sizes you up from the opposite corner and blows you a kiss that irks you the entire match, but you think you’d have been more offended and surprised if he didn’t. You worry Adam will lose his breath or his balance but it neither happen until the pin.

Ultimately the reunion goes well, and you win. Adam’s bloated face is a collage of features you can’t forget and flaws you don’t remember. You grapple with Adam’s fingers at your side when he tries to get free of your embrace, and when you both escape the venue by the fire-exit you end the wordless farewell with a brief stroke of your index finger down his hairless skull and behind his ear. You walk off before he can invite you to dinner. 

You jog through the parking lot vaulting between plane & object, only to halt when you twist your foot the wrong direction grinding off a truck tire. You wince, squint around the parked cars. No-one’s watching but Adam, his shadow reaching out to you from from the open backdoor of the venue. You go on tumbling. There’s never enough obstacles in any given space to satisfy you. 

You take fewer indie bookings. Lucha Underground lasts another year and you stay with it. Once it closes you transition to AAA, and you feel like you’ve been hired to puppet your own body. A flower-eyed teenaged intern from the network production offices refers to you in code as ‘A.J. 2.0’ to your chagrin, but it doesn’t stick. In spite of your misgivings, you sign an IMPACT! contract to overlap. You reassure yourself that you can never have too much going on. Jeff gives it to you in person stood outside an IHOP, old-school style with a printed page of conditions and a bic that is running out of ink.

After a January night taping with uncharacteristic botch after botch you pray they’ll edit out, you confess during pillow-talk that you’d give it all up to go back for one last shot at the big one. Kira‘s engagement ring winks at you and she says, “what’s so big about it, eh?”. You didn’t think it needed clarifying. You shield your face in a pillow and feign a doze so you don’t have to admit that you covet the other impossible fantasies you’ve had come to grinning life, how the dream held more juice than the realisation. 

It’s for the best you don’t say what you’re thinking; it's just more wrestler-talk. Of course you don’t miss creeps who always threw shit on your rental because you said something derogatory about their backwater, or the knowing sideline leers from DeMott and his cronies no matter how high you hauled your sorry carcass up the card, or the last-second scripts lobbed out for the deafening sneers of millions. You don’t miss the slashes that widened in your coat because Mel fronted that she couldn’t sew and growled that her name wasn’t Candice LeRae, or the way that prototype coat made you ache as if it were a lead sheet over your arm instead. You don’t miss how you shivered in your own sweat to stay motionless as possible in front of Vince, who eventually flicked you away like a stray eyelash. Eyelids tight as rubber, swollen joints, the bead of liquid at the tip of a needle remain as the sediment of memory from the life you left. 

It’s forgotten pain. It’s nothing to mourn or long for or pay any mind, not with Kira’s breasts & thighs humming beneath you on your first night in the new house. Her hair smells of the spiced sage out on the chaparral as she sighs and disintegrates under your fingers over the mattresses for which you both paid top dollar, in total agreement and without argument. As your gorgeous wife throws her hips back and scratches your pecs, you hardly think of smacking into a bleached canvas as wide as the bed then pressing down on a different body. It’s a foetal thought, gone by the next inhale.

For months you blink away this afterimage, but only ever right before you touch her. You don’t take the blue chews every night anymore. You do hack up bile splashes to stain the collar of your hoodies enough times to concern WebMD.

You marry Kira in midsummer, and it takes your mind off it. You recruit Brian, Nic, Matt & Mike as groomsmen. You all go out drinking like pirates prior to the ceremony; it’s more fun than you’ve had in four years and your toes flex under the table trying to contain your spasms of embarrassment, but there’s not enough hours to send off your worn-thin youth and also get some shut-eye so you elect to shuffle straight back to the hotel through the receding dark to fetch your tux and your page of scrawled promises.

You have drunk so much it’s as if the alcohol is displacing the essence in your spirit, and this is a curious philosophical idea you feel compelled to put to the companion who walks out of step next to you. Your mysterious friend says nothing to that, and you can’t logically explain through the drunkenness why his reluctance to speak is unexpected and strange to you considering you struggle to identify his face in the half-light when you’re this wasted. The man you can’t place circles knuckles at your tailbone propelling you into an elevator, inside your suite, out of your clothes and under a spray. He has cold fingers and you hate his metallic cologne. Though you willingly let him manoeuvre your actions, you don’t turn and confirm who he is - as if refusing to look him in the face before the dawn is a superstition. Your unknown assistant smooths you horizontal over the sheets, covers you with beating warmth and hitches defeated cries into your streaming hair.

An alarm you didn't set rattles your phone off the dresser. You move on autopilot. It's seven in the morning and you stand stock-still to stare at yourself in a daylit cheval glass, damp-necked but dressed to the nines, and it's only then you realise there’s no-one behind you on the bed or anywhere in the room. Rubbing sweat from your forehead, you make it to Padua Hills Theatre Hall with a half hour to spare. 

Behind the main pagoda Nic twists your locks into a neat bun and ribs you for your choice of footwear, the same white sneakers that you picked for the ushers. You don’t see why it’s funny or remarkable, and your confusion has Nic chuckling harder. As a man who just made himself respectable your first order of business is, after the vows and the kiss and the first cut into a cake, to chase him through the copsed lawns and dunk him in the ornamental fountain for being a brat. Matt booms in glee and slaps Nic’s cheeks when the poor guy coughs to the surface. Brian tuts then pretends he didn’t see, avoiding the splashing and sipping his mimosa. Mike doesn’t see it happen at all, chatting to guests like he’s getting paid and mock-flirting with the girl you hired to deejay. She came with great recommendations. Mike’s best and most obnoxious gimmick-voice carries over the crowd; he's only doing it to amuse a cackling Maryse, and you’re as unfazed by the scene as she is because you both know the girl he’s cornered is a punchline.

Before you have the chance to call Mike over to stage a quick picture for social media, you stop. All you can think about is that white canvas wide as a plain and the vectors of a body that isn’t yours or your wife’s, again. You are paralysed.

It’s only when Kira shimmers into focus in front of you, her throat blooming jewels, that you’re freed. Leading the way to the dancefloor you pack the tent with a throng eager to witness b-boying, capoeira, and a foxtrot you had to learn by copying Jericho's routines on that tv contest he lost. The performance lasts and lasts so that the wedding guests linger so long they have to be swept away with the exhausted confetti & shredded petals.

When the vision comes to you a final time, it’s five months on.

You're invited to cameo in a baby-shower, at the five-million dollar manor thirty miles east of the place you’re calling home these days. It’s in a better neighbourhood than yours. You burrow next to Kira, both dressed in borrowed t-shirts, together in a guest bed where you won’t have sex tonight like the newlyweds you are. She is sleeping off several glasses of Korbel and you can’t get comfortable thanks to a lingering months-old scald of a kiss from the sun over Fiji. You haven’t slept more than a couple of hours a night since you got back from Survivor, off the island where food tasted real - acrid seeds from tough sharp fruit that stuck between your gums, fed to you by large sinewed hands - and the ground didn’t shudder underfoot. You resolve that you could use sand between your toes, soon, and daydream about where to take your next vacation. You listen to Kira wheeze through an R.E.M phase while you mull this over. 

A smash resounds in another wing of the enormous house. Your thought is broken. You can just make out that it’s Maryse, yelling, and in her native tongue. You strain to bring to mind what this might have to do with you, if anything, and what you might have said to the wrong person at the party downstairs now curling in on itself.

You can only recall sensations distinct from one another; the itch left by a lick of salt on the roof of your mouth, a tick from a clock overhead where you stood by yourself in a kitchen with the lights off, and the dig of a shaved-smooth chin into the tendons in your neck & collar from behind with so much force that it hurt like a dumbbell fly. You waited for physical contact at your nape, and you thought that’s what you felt. You said, “please”, and forgot what it was you asked as you giggled off the booze you’re not allowed if you want to preserve your trademark abs. There was no reply. Then came touches down your chest to your pelvis, over each rib, as if making sure you were truly there in the flesh and not mere statuary. You said something else, about being over forty and coming home. 

A baby’s cry crackled over a plastic pink two-way monitor stood on the worktop next to a Tiffany vase of dripping tuberose that reeked like shit and a new set of glowing knives, and the hands and the head’s weight left you. 

There it was, then; the pervading image of the canvas, and the skin of a pale solid chest that blurred into a veined marble counter-top. To get away from it you fought with the handle on a French-door that opened the wrong way then fell outside into a bunch of pink balloons. The world whirled when you were still and stabilised when you moved. You choked on expensive air as you stumbled, tripped, spluttered into the storm drain. You flinched when Matt swung the door open and lumbered over with a pumped arm to pat your back. He’s a good guy, a nice-guy; you all are. You screwed your eyes shut, gagged then spat as his nervous chattering joined that of a possum wailing in the bushes.

This is all you think about after, under a foreign duvet and your wife’s limbs. You rotate your jaw to relax the tightness, and wince at the cartilage crumbling. You never knew you ground your teeth in your sleep until you disturbed Kira one too many times with the noise. You shove her up and out of the palatial room at an unsociable early hour then through the maid’s entrance to the drive, treading over surrounding flower-beds to reach your car while soaking your only pair of decent dress-shoes in dew. At one point you break away and leap to a mossed boulder demarking the limit of the estate, which you roll and sprint over to burn off the consistent pulsing desire to vomit.

It’s not all about these two encounters, though, this need for constant motion congealing in your throat and your lungs and your calves that won’t settle down. You know, with a surety you can’t explain, that if you can just purge your imagination and whet the pang in your core, then you will once more feel fate working efficiently through all your sinews. You’ll feel like yourself again, correct as kinetic energy. 

All through the fall & winter you ignore Kira’s admonishments to rest, and instead you add bassjumping to your sunday mornings. Thanks to bullshit security and inconsiderate construction you can’t scale any buildings on Magnolia or Moorpark, so you end up miles away trying and failing to clamber up the sheer side of Crunch Fitness on Van Nuys Boulevard. You tear your vibrams in the several attempts. Tracing routes over the rooftops comes first, then you fill the weeks with more shows than you have to book and dark matches for no reason other than wanting some visible damage to show for the years out in the wilderness. For the first time it bothers you that no one can seem to touch you, hurt you, leave a mark. 

You go after Austin Aries on Twitter because he’s a TNA douche, you’re old enough not to care about publicly trashing another man and you can use the attention no matter how negative. It works too well. You take out the rest of your frustration on the job-squad. Working stiff and no-selling does nothing but piss off Double-J and your opponents, and Button does not long tolerate peeling you from the floor and scrunching you into his arms to toss into a locker-room after every third match. Brian is the one turning Heel but you can’t help feeling that is backwards. March, April, May & June go by, and you hang on to the belts with deepening guilt until weeks after your contract expires. You don’t mention this to a single person on the roster.

A tug under your muscles like a suture warns you to wait for your moment to announce your return. Before you can plan a strategy, one is arranged for you. Hunter himself schedules you on both Backstage & The Bump; he emails you call-sheets with professional speed at which you scoff. 

You spend September, October & November in the dermatologist & dentist offices, stopping to approve of your reflection in their windows. You struggle into outfits that you rummage out of a lock-up you didn't think you'd open this decade. You go to pilates with Kira and a swarm of soccer moms, most of whom ogle you rather than participate. You can’t figure out how it’s possible to feel unprepared for something you’ve known better and more completely than anything else in your life. 

When you drive to the studio, you shift in your seat at each gear-change because your back is knotting. On arrival you hug the Millennial cast & crewmembers in turn, all of whom gape and swoon with too much enthusiasm. On the couch fielding Q&A your leg bounces with a tic you didn’t think you have, then Mike calls in over video-link and you lose your cues. From your view of his upper half you see has his sleeves wound over his wrists and he has just got out of the shower. You talk over his answers and make outdated pop-culture references that only garner you blank stares from the room. Mike‘s wi-fi connection isn’t strong, and so his comments lag and he doesn’t intervene soon enough to cover your fuck-ups.

It’s the second beginning’s end.

You don’t prep for matches, as a veteran; in the minutes before show-time you practise your qi-gong, not a physical art you find easy due to the stasis it demands. Your belly expands and your diaphragm twinges. You want to explore the arena roof but you stay where you’re instructed, discerning an echo in the corridor further off as Copeland murmuring to Orton. You aren’t sure whether you still have heat with them, and you don’t want to find out and get into it while at work.

Mike sits adjacent on the locker-room bench, shoulder flush with yours though the room you were ushered into is empty. He’s so close that you can see every movement of his slack overbitten mouth in profile, where it is rippling around handfuls of oreos. He’s eating straight out of the bag with audible crunching and describing Madison’s pre-K syllabus in excruciating detail at the same time. Apparently she, an infant not yet three, packed the snacks as a cute little gift in his gymbag. You don’t listen to the rest. Mid-sentence he offers you a cookie and you wave him away. He snorts at you and picks something from your pants leaving a snail-trail of crumbs & spit; a hangnail you tore off to prevent a worse injury later. He smirks and says, “you know, someone could curse you with one of these”. 

You know that. Mel used to tell you the same thing, as well as every other wives’ tale her howling abuelita imparted as she stirred viscous coffee in a pan until it was burning and bubbling. You got so far and so deep in with these women, that toward the final year of your longest relationship the berry-brown matriarch of the Perez family had you ducking under the bead-curtains of a bruja with a vial of Mel’s blood in your palm to do something about your non-cooperative dick. In retrospect you don’t believe you were sick or defective.

This is why you say without a waver, “who has the power? I’m the only shaman here." At that Mike starts humming the Papa Shango theme and smirks, reminiscent of one of his several ridiculous pet dogs begging for leftover chicken-bones as they often do at dinners hosted by the Mizanins. You guess Mike will probably repeat the joke to Maryse as if he’s the one who came up with it, and she’ll laugh on a pleased inward gasp and snigger around her manicured tips at her clever cornfed husband. You don’t care what he tells her. He can take the mic and the credit from here on out, as far as you’re concerned.

Your confidence is warranted; you already have everything you wanted. You’re where you said you would be even if you can’t pinpoint the reason why you came, what the big idea was. It doesn’t matter that your banter seems to fall flat, and steel of the ropes seems to resist your tried-and-tested finishing moves, and the crowds seem to take up too few seats. You won’t take it back.

Dye from the cookies stains Mike’s smile Hollywood-white to black. You can’t help but catalogue other flaws & changes, like the everyday habits he’s developed of chugging ambien dissolved in water or wearing street clothes in neutral colors - today’s jacket is the same gray as your wedding attire. You notice he never removes his shirt in front of you unless absolutely necessary, despite him being in the best shape of his life. You notice too that he doesn’t have a single question for you, let alone a hundred like he did when he first got here. He still doesn’t shut up and you still talk over him and the two of you still clutch one another in the ring when making saves, but beyond that there is some crucial element missing between you. You don't ride with him show to show, and he spends more time with the bathroom sinks and his cellphone. As a matter of course you shrug whenever he says a careless goodbye shambling off to drive behind the ten-wheelers carrying your show state to state.

Still, the people love what you’re doing and the creative department can’t get enough either. It’s your show, finally, and you can go on like this.

And if you once believed you shared a resplendent history when he’d cling to you awestruck at signings, would crawl into your passenger seat, would follow you outside concert halls whenever you were taken by the mood to traverse a wall and would content himself to stand by and count aloud the jets overhead as they swum through the smog while you climbed; now you concede that’s just your version of events.

You reach your arms ceiling-ward to relieve a tingling ligament and say, “even if I did get cursed, I’d just blame it on the Fiend and get on with my day.” It’s not a shot at him, really; you just want to jam the monotony of these tete-a-tetes. Mike rolls his eyes and doesn’t reply while crumpling his packet and brushing his lips with his forearm, and you arch up into a cat-jump then glide past him across the room without touching anything in it. 

Your equilibrium levels as you head for the door. It’s time to remind the world what you can do with a mat and three ropes and four corners, no matter what stationary mass is impeding you. 

Curtain call. _Être et durer_ , you hiss into your clasped fists right when your music hits.

Tonight after you turn in at the Doubletree your wife will call you, and it will go to voicemail. She’ll remind you she's on her cycle tomorrow, and then she'll sign off with her customary, “sleep tight, baby”. 

You won’t respond to her. You’re knocked out. In the grip of a dream that will pin you down, you’ll catch yourself falling from the top storey of Titan Tower by grabbing an open window-ledge and hanging on. Mike will fall with you but will have nothing to catch onto in his own descent; thus you will be forced to watch helpless as his body plummets meters below you, morphing in grotesque shapes and ripping through space and phasing out of existence with a supersonic shriek.

**Author's Note:**

> Now who the fuck in this club is ready to cry? 
> 
> Hint: loop the song ‘Faded Flowers’ by Shriekback while you read for max effect.
> 
> Imagine my disgust on discovering there’s no tag and no other works for Joey Mercury/Johnny Nitro. 
> 
> Miz/Morrison and past!Mercury/Nitro slash is in here but barely detectable, and according to preference can easily be read as intense nostalgic gen instead. 
> 
> This became midlife-crisis!JoMo timeline without my say-so. I originally wanted to kickstart this ship again with a spicy crowdpleasing “I’m in love with my tag partner and have been for ten years and we’re getting to work together again but now WE’RE STRAIGHT MARRIED to other people oh noooooooo” crack.  
> Instead I got Gatsbyish wangst from the mind of a man who lives only to JUMP OFF WALLS.
> 
> I’m not even sure what’s wrong with John, here; he definitely has insomnia and sunstroke and a bit of FOMO mixed with age-related crises and gay panic, but I don’t know why he just keeps inexplicably injuring himself or throwing up everywhere he goes and having vaguely disturbing visions. He’s beyond a nice guy as is Mike, so I don’t know why I felt compelled put them through a wringer in fiction; maybe it’s just cathartic having pretty and sweet people suffer. 
> 
> EDIT: This is riddled with mistakes and I’ll fix the shit out of it soon, so apologies to the dozen or more folks who read the beta draft that I couldn’t restrain myself from posting.
> 
> Usual disclaimers apply. I own nothing and no-one herein, and though real names & personalities are used this is a work of complete fiction.


End file.
